Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Donald Trump campaign is vetting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) as a potential running mate for the presumptive presidential nominee, according to multiple reports.

Those with knowledge of the process told The New York Times on Thursday that Christie is among those being vetted as a possible vice presidential pick for Trump.

And an unnamed source told CNN the governor has received the official paperwork for the vetting process.

The New York Times reports this in a story titled "Chris Christie Becomes Powerful Figure in Donald Trump Campaign," which tells us that Christie

has quietly emerged as one of the most influential advisers to his party’s presumptive presidential nominee and one of the leading contenders to be his running mate....

Already, Mr. Christie has begun the task of designing a government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Tapped to lead Mr. Trump’s transition efforts, Mr. Christie has taken a role that some of his allies liken to that of a White House chief of staff, soliciting views on what a potential Trump administration should look like.

Mr. Christie has taken the transition process firmly in hand, according to people familiar with his activities....

Well, it's good for Christie to have something to occupy his time now that he doesn't have a job anymore ... Wait, what? He still does? He's governor until January 2018? Sorry!

Christie, we're told, has many duties, among them this:

Behind the scenes, Mr. Christie has prodded his fellow governors and Republican political donors to line up behind a candidate many view with distaste. He has made only modest headway in the last few months: Mr. Trump has struggled badly with fund-raising and Mr. Christie has pleaded with donors, in personal phone calls and fund-raising events, to give him a second look.

At a breakfast fund-raiser in Manhattan last week, Mr. Christie cajoled reluctant donors to back Mr. Trump, arguing that giving anything less than enthusiastic support would be a de facto vote for Hillary Clinton.

So how's the persuading-donors-to-consider-Trump thing working out? Let's see: Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer once thought so highly of Christie that in 2011 he urged Christie to run for president; last year, Singer held a fund-raiser for Christie, although he ultimately threw his support in the presidential race to Marco Rubio. Still, you'd think Christie would remain in Singer's good graces, right? You'd imagine that if Christie were touting Trump, Singer would take Christie's recommendation seriously. Right?

A Wall Street billionaire thinks a Donald Trump presidency could spell doom for the global economy.

Paul Singer, who runs the hedge fund Elliott Management and has been a big GOP donor in the past, told a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival that he wasn’t very impressed with Trump’s economic policy positions, according to CNBC.

“The most impactful of the economic policies that I recall him coming out for are these anti-trade policies. And I think if he actually stuck to those policies and gets elected president, it’s close to a guarantee of a global depression, widespread global depression,” he said.

"Close to a guarantee of a global depression." Excellent powers of persuasion, Chris!

“I don’t want to name anybody -- what I would most likely be looking at, and I feel like I’d be going a little bit in reverse, in other words, I’d be going for a political person. Because I don’t need a business person, I need a political person. Somebody that can deal with the hill, that can deal with Congress and get things done, get things passed, et cetera, et cetera,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News.

But maybe he'll go with Christie instead, for any of several reasons:

* He likes Christie because Christie is his most shamelessly sycophantic backer.

This morning, Slate published a series of recollections from crew members on Donald Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice ... There’s one passage that’s of particular interest ... it involves a former “midlevel producer” on the show recalling Cheeto Jesus‘s fondness for keeping a certain contestant on the show despite his demonstrable ineptitude.

“There was a fat contestant who was a buffoon and a fuckup. And he would fuck up week after week, and the producers would figure that he’d screwed up so badly that Trump would have to fire him. But Trump kept deciding to fire someone else. The producers had to scramble because of course Trump can never be seen to make a bad call on the show, so we had to re-engineer the footage to make a different contestant look bad. Later, I heard a producer talk to him, and Trump said, ‘Everybody loves a fat guy. People will watch if you have a funny fat guy around. Trust me, it’s good for ratings.’”

Whenever I see, or hear or read, of Christie I am invariably reminded of an Al Franken Saturday Night Live skit from back in the eighties (hell, maybe even the sevevties, portraying a Ford worker laid off from the Mahwah plant maintaining his comfortable middle-class suburban lifestyle giving five dollar blow-jobs down in The City.